The Coming Mass Extinction In The Oceans

Earlier this week a story surfaced about the threat of a future mass extinction in the oceans. A Google news search reveals that this story appeared at phys.org, scienceblog.com, sciencealert.com.au (Australia) and sciencedaily.com, and nowhere else, at least not here in the United States.

We see, then, that this story was confined to the science ghetto. It was not reported by the Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, ABC, MSNBC, or any of the rest. The story was based on a research paper called Extinctions In Ancient And Modern Seas (pdf) which recently appeared in the journal Trends In Ecology And Evolution.

I'll quote from the Science Daily story called World's Sea Life Is 'Facing Major Shock', Marine Scientists Warn.

Life in the world's oceans faces far greater change and risk of large-scale extinctions than at any previous time in human history, a team of the world's leading marine scientists has warned.

That's a stunning lead. You might think the world would pay attention to a story that starts off like that.

The researchers from Australia, the US, Canada, Germany, Panama, Norway and the UK have compared events which drove massive extinctions of sea life in the past with what is observed to be taking place in the seas and oceans globally today.

Three of the five largest extinctions of the past 500 million years were associated with global warming and acidification of the oceans — trends which also apply today, the scientists say in a new article in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

Other extinctions were driven by loss of oxygen from seawaters [anoxia], pollution, habitat loss and pressure from human hunting and fishing — or a combination of these factors.

"Currently, the Earth is again in a period of increased extinctions and extinction risks, this time mainly caused by human factors," the scientists stated. While the data is harder to collect at sea than on land, the evidence points strongly to similar pressures now being felt by sea life as for land animals and plants...

Marine extinction events vary greatly. In the 'Great Death' of the Permian 250 million years ago, for example, an estimated 95 per cent of marine species died out due to a combination of warming, acidification, loss of oxygen and habitat. Scientists have traced the tragedy in the chemistry of ocean sediments laid down at the time, and abrupt loss of many sea animals from the fossil record.

"We are seeing the signature of all those [Permian] drivers today — plus the added drivers of human overexploitation and pollution from chemicals, plastics and nutrients," Prof. Pandolfi says.

"The fossil record tells us that sea life is very resilient — that it recovers after one of these huge setbacks. But also that it can take millions of years to do so."

The researchers wrote the paper out of their concern that the oceans appear to be on the brink of another major extinction event.

"There may be still time to act," Prof. Pandolfi says. "If we understand what drives ocean extinction, we can also understand what we need to do to prevent or minimize it.

I don't want to dwell on the details of the paper. You can read it if you want to (it's linked-in above). I did take the time to grab Table 1, which you can peruse at your leisure. It is quite informative.

Click to enlarge in a new tab or window

I used to worry about this stuff. Years ago, I would have gotten all bent of shape about the fact that only a few people seem to care about the very real, looming possibility of a mass extinction in the oceans. In fact, I believe the probability of such an event occurring in the next 200 years is near unity (= 1).

I don't worry about this stuff anymore. But I do want our collective descendants to know there were a few people in 2012 who thought such probable catastrophes were worth noting and reporting on.

In the United States, the media are too preoccupied with Hopey-Changey versus The Mittster to notice that there is a coming mass extinction in the oceans. I want our descendants to know that, too. Few people will remember in 2050 who ran for president in 2012, but those hapless folks will remark frequently on the fact that millions of humans are dying off because the oceans are turning to shit.

Posting will be light over the next few days. Have a nice weekend.

Comments

[PBD]

I first came upon the concept of “Canfield Oceans” in a fairly brief reference to it in Gwynne Dyer’s 2008 book “Climate Wars”.

I was shocked to think that such a mechanism has a realistic possibility of turning Global Warming into not just a human extinction event – but extinction of most life on earth – as apparently happened in 4 out of the 5 major mass extinctions in Earth’s history (the 5th being the asteroid that did in the dinosaurs).

However, I read more about the idea in Peter Ward’s 2007 book “Under a Green Sky”. (http://energyskeptic.com/2011/will-global-warming-drive-us-extinct/)

I was lucky to pick up that book for a couple of bucks off the discount table at a major bookstore. A half dozen or so copies of it had presumably found their way there because they were lousy sellers and nobody was interested in them.

That is, it would seem nobody was interested in the possible imminent (in geologic terms) extinction of all (90%+) life on Earth.

‘Nuff said!

[Dave Cohen]

Re: a canfield ocean

I first read about a "canfield" ocean when I read his original paper in the journal Science (1998)-- A new model for Proterozoic ocean chemistry. Nature 396:450–453.

For background, you can read here.

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/43/18045.full

"About a decade ago, Canfield offered a very different possibility—that ventilation of the deep ocean lagged behind the Great Oxygen Event (GOE, about 2.3 billion years ago) by more than a billion years, resulting in a vast, deep reservoir of hydrogen sulfide, but long-held presumptions about photosynthetic life in the surface waters remained untouched..."

Back in 1998, I did not associate such a possibility with future oceans. Donald Canfield was talking about the Proterozoic -- "the period of Earth's history that began 2.5 billion years ago and ended 542.0 million years ago is known as the Proterozoic"

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/precambrian/proterozoic.php

Now, I'm not so sure we might not eventually end up with oceans that look much like they did a billion years ago.

-- Dave

[T E CHo]

- We need to change from the tired old liberal paradigm (yeah, I'm sick of that word too...) 'people are all basically the same' to the opposite - 'people are all basically very different'. There ARE a few of us who think and feel differently from others in 'long-term oriented' areas.

This is only one of the near infinite ways, motivations, capabilities, biases, thought patterns, &etc, that people can be different.

Not that it'll do much good in the short term.

[Dave Cohen]

Re: This is only one of the near infinite ways, motivations, capabilities, biases, thought patterns, &etc, that people can be different

People are pretty much the same everywhere you look. The rare people who aren't like the others are the glaring exceptions who prove the rule. Many of my (relatively few) readers are glaring exceptions. That's why they read here.

And my ultimate conclusion is stronger still -- humans can't be any other way than they way they are.

-- Dave

[john c. wilson]

A few years back there was major media coverage of a published note that phytoplankton populations worldwide had decreased 40%. It wasn't like this was something that had been happening gradually. Almost all the loss happened in a couple decades. No reason to think the loss is slowing, plenty of plausible supposition it's accelerating. Without those phytoplankton humans will run out of oxygen to breathe. Say, did you hear about Lance Armstrong?

There's a TED lecture by a coral reef ecologist, Jeremy Jackson, that breaks the hopeful coda pattern. Jackson is a big guy in his field and leaves with a promise the oceans are in their last throes. It's not 200 years Dave. They're nearly dead now. Just still twitching a little.

[Dave Cohen]

John C. Wilson --

You seem to be a relatively new reader. Try these Google searches.

Phytoplankton

https://www.google.com/search?q=phytoplankton+site%3Awww.declineoftheempire.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t

Jeremy Jackson

https://www.google.com/search?q=jeremy+jackson+site%3Awww.declineoftheempire.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t

Destruction of the oceans

https://www.google.com/search?q=oceans+site%3Awww.declineoftheempire.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t

-- Dave

[john c. wilson]

Thank you.

Sometimes I see vestiges of rhetorical optimism here that perplex me. Not at all surprised you've covered the ground before. Will most likely read as long as you keep going.

[Ben]

The Russians will speed the the process of mass ocean extinctions along: http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/russian-oil-exploration-in-arctic-circle-causes-major-environmental-damage-a-851617.html

[Mike Roberts]

I think about this stuff a lot but I've got no illusions that humans will do anything about the destruction they wreak every day. It's like my note about the bird declines in Britain, that I mentioned yesterday. When I mentioned this to people in England, I was greeted with near indifference or denial by almost all of them.

Unlike you, though, I do worry about this stuff.

[David Waddle]

I used to get upset about these type of things. I finally figured out that nothing's going to change. There will never be a concentrated effort to save the oceans or the rest of the planet. It's just not going to happen. We humans are nothing special. We are part of the natural world. We just figured out how to exploit the rest of the natural world for our short term benefit. We will be here until we're not and that will be the end of it.

[Alexander Ač]

And with it, finally, a little bit a climate realism:

Prof Sir Bob Watson said that any hope of restricting the average temperature rise to 2C was "out the window".

He said that the rise could be as high as 5C - with dire consequences.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19348194

Cheers,

Alex

[Alexander Ač]

There is a lot of Hopium in that article, unfortunately:

Sir Bob added that deep cuts in CO2 emissions were possible using innovative technologies, without harming economic recovery.

"This doesn't take a revolution in energy technology - an evolution would get us there.

-- sorry for linking,

Alex

[Gail]

"...humans can't be any other way than they way they are..."

http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2012/08/we-cannot-escape-ourselves.html